The present disclosure relates generally to educational tools. In particular, educational tools introducing children to core educational concepts in fun, interactive ways are described.
Education is a central concern to parents, society, and to national prosperity. Early education is recognized as a highly important concept to build a strong foundation for later educational initiatives in the classroom and other sources. Core educational concepts that are important for children to be introduced to at a young age include basic concepts in mathematics, spelling, and color characteristics. Unfortunately, many children lack access to educational tools that can enable their educational development in these and other areas.
Known educational tools are not entirely satisfactory for the range of applications in which they are employed. For example, existing educational tools fail to provide a fun, interactive experience to children. Parents and educators alike recognize that interactive and fun activities are effective ways to maintain children's focus and interest. Maintaining a child's focus and interest is essential to conveying core educational concepts.
Many existing educational tools do not give children and parents sufficient opportunity to interact with the tool, which causes children to lose interest in the tool and the educational concepts involved. Physically manipulating and exploring items is inherent to children, and tools are needed that facilitate those natural physical instincts of children to hold their attention.
Existing educational tools also suffer from being too complicated in some contexts. For example, computerized educational tools are prone to being too complicated or too abstract to meet children's needs. Computerized tools may allow interaction with a mouse or touch screen, but such interaction is not as inherent to children as is manipulating and exploring physical items with an optimum number of interactive degrees of freedom.
A particular limitation of conventional educational tools is their failure to bridge gaps between abstract concepts and concrete realities more readily understood by children. For example, educational tools directed to mathematics are often limited to symbolic representations of numbers without providing depictions of real-word, relatable items to give context to the mathematical concepts involved. Educational tools attempting to teach children letters and spelling often lack reinforcing, engaging, approachable subject matter that helps children see how letters interact to form words.
Thus, there exists a need for educational tools that improve upon and advance the design of known educational tools. Examples of new and useful educational tools relevant to the needs existing in the field are discussed below.
Disclosure addressing one or more of the identified existing needs is provided in the detailed description below. Examples of references relevant to educational tools include U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,459,999; 2,932,909; D394,878; D395,675; D651,649; 3,419,973; 3,783,531; 3,762,071; 3,200,517; 3,199,227; 4,634,385; 4,389,193; 3,289,324; 1,671,758; 4,643,680; 7,354,070; 4,313,727; 3,248,809; 6,869,286; and 2,938,282. The complete disclosures of the above patents and patent applications are herein incorporated by reference for all purposes.